Thursday, May 22, 2008

Khosla Rebuts the WSJ's Rebuttal

Here’s the danger in becoming a well-known venture capitalist: You may well become the locus for heated debates over cleantech and environmentalism, even when you’re not expecting it. That’s what happened to Vinod Khosla yesterday, when the Wall Street Journal lashed out with a short hit piece on his policies titled “Khosla’s Conspiracy”....

...But is the WSJ right in its own implied assertion that food-based biofuels are a villain? Not really. Essentially, Khosla is right: Food often moves hundreds or thousands of miles from where it’s grown to its target market, so quadrupling the price of transportation fuels over a few years’ time would have driven up prices without the help of biofuels. For its own reasons, the WSJ doesn’t deign to address that argument. Khosla, for his own part, has been bright enough to avoid investing in first-gen biofuels like corn ethanol.

To address these points, and some others of his own, Khosla issued a rebuttal, sending it to us and some other news outlets. We’re reprinting it, with editing to take out some less substantive portions, after the jump....MORE